Category: Web

In my former professional life, I used to do a lot of .Net development, mostly ASP.Net development focussed on whatever alternative to WebForms was available at that time – e.g. ASP.Net MVP (remember that?), ASP.Net MVC, ASP.Net Web Pages.

These days, however, I’m primarily a JavaScript developer and it’s been years since I’ve written any .Net code. At Esri I get to focus on front-end web development, and if I’m developing on the server it’s in Node.js. To quote David Spriggs as he was musing about Node and GitHub, “we’re lucky to be alive at this point in history.”

I’ve been working with Allan Laframboise to add examples of how to use Esri’s popular Bootstrap Map framework without a dependency on jQuery. The Dojo-Bootstrap library, a Dojo port of the Twitter Bootstrap JavaScript modules, finally has a release candidate that is compatible with Bootstrap 3.x. This enabled us to replace the references to the Bootstrap JavaScript with references to the Dojo-Bootstrap modules and completely remove the reference to jQuery.

Now you can choose whether you’d like to get started using Bootstrap with jQuery or Dojo.

I’ve recently been playing with the grunt-amdcheck plugin to remove unused dependencies from AMD modules. It’s common for define statements in an AMD project to accumulate unused dependencies over time as developers refactor, and it’s a good idea to clean those up from time to time as unused dependencies can:

Make it harder to maintain your code

Cause the browser to make unnecessary asynchronous requests at run time

Personally, I think Dave Bouwman’s introductory section on the how and why of JavaScript unit testing is as good as any presentation or book (mapping or no) that I’ve seen or read on the subject and is definitely worth a watch.

Beyond that, if you’re interested in the mechanics of testing mapping apps with any of the frameworks we cover (the Intern, Jasmine, Karma, etc) there are plenty of resources to get you going.

Last month I challenged myself to try make at least one contribution a day to GitHub for 30 days straight, and as a result I’ve been able to make long overdue updates to all of my existing repositories as well as make meaningful contributions to other peoples’ open source projects. Some of the things I accomplished during the challenge:

The challenge also helped me up my Git Fu a bit, since (sadly) most of my work projects are not managed in Git. If you’re like me, most of your GitHub activity takes place outside of your normal work hours, and this kind of challenge can really help you get to things that have been on the back burner for too long.

31 days so far… The gaping holes in the above calendar could be labeled “TFS/SVN Time.”